EA has had to strip some features from the game in order to get it to work "properly". Picture: Supplied Source: National Features

A PERSON claiming to be an EA employee wrote an open letter to the video game company on Reddit, saying they were "deeply embarrassed" by the disastrous launch of SimCity last week.

The user, known only as "Disappointed EA", offered as proof of their employment the fact that all EA staff received an email about International Women's Day from EA executive vice president and chief talent officer Gabrielle Toledano.

Two days after posting the letter, it had received 1209 comments and 2348 up votes.

The user criticised the company for the game's always-on DRM which left some users unable to log on and others waiting for hours to play the game.

The company was forced to strip the game of some its features in order to get it to run smoothly meaning that gamers were forced to play a "lite" version of the game, different from what had been promised from the outset.

"I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of SimCity and I hope you are too," Disappointed EA wrote. "When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we’ve collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how, for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes.

"We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly."

The user said that the company ignored its own values of “Think Consumers First, Be Accountable, Act With Integrity, Create Quality and Innovation, Be Bold" and "Learn and Grow".

"What you’ve demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values," Disappointed EA wrote. "They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the SimCity team."

Disappointed EA said the always-on DRM was not about consumers or piracy but about "covering your own asses".

"It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles," Disappointed EA wrote.

“You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers."

If Disappointed EA is indeed an EA employee this is a bold move indeed, and a sign that consumers aren't the only ones who feel let down.

News.com.au has approached both EA and the user, Disappointed EA, for comment but is yet to receive a response.

This is the letter in full. It was deleted from Reddit but has since been reposted. The user claims they were not the one to remove the post and is adamant they are a legitimate EA employee.

“I understand the skepticism with posts like these,” he commented on his post.

“To the executives at EA, from one of your employees,

I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of Sim City and I hope you are too. When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we’ve collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes. We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly.

Another thing I see when I walk around our campus are massive banners that display what are said to be our company values. They are on posters on every floor, included in company-wide emails and hanging above the cafeteria in bright colors. You even print them on our coffee mugs so we see them every day. But somehow when planning the launch of Sim City, you threw them all out the window.

Most important of the values you are ignoring is Think Consumers First. What part of the Sim City DRM scheme, which has rendered the game unplayable for hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe, demonstrates that you are thinking about consumers before you are thinking about yourselves? Does “first” mean something different in boardrooms than it does to the rest of us? Does the meaning of that word change when you get the word “executive” in front of your title?

You can’t even pretend that you didn’t know consumers would be angry about this. Common sense aside, consumers complained about this during your public betas. In fact, when one of them posted his criticisms on the forums, he was banned! You tried to silence your critics. The same thing is happening now as users write in to demand refunds. What part of this behavior (sic) aligns with our company value to Be Accountable?

What you’ve demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values. They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the Sim City team. This DRM scheme is not about the consumers or even about piracy. It’s about covering your own asses. It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles. You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers. I think this violates the Act With Integrity value I’m looking at on my own coffee mug right now.

On behalf of your other employees, I’d like to ask you to fix this. Allow the Sim City team to patch the game to run offline. If Create Quality and Innovation is still a core value that you believe in, then this shouldn’t be a hard decision. Games that gamers can’t play because of server overload or ISP issues are NOT quality. Be Bold by giving the consumers what they want and take accountability for the mistake.

Finally I’d like to ask you to follow the last company value on the list in the future: Learn and Grow. When you made this mistake with Spore, the company and all your employees suffered for it. You didn’t learn from that mistake and you are making it again with Sim City.

So please, learn from this debacle. Don’t do this again. Grow into better leaders and actually apply our company values when you make decisions. Don’t just use them as tools to motivate your staff. With the money, talent and intellectual property available to EA, we should be leading the industry into a golden age of consumer-focused game publishing. Instead we’re the most reviled game publisher in the world. That’s your fault. Things can only change if you actually start following the company values and apply them to every title we launch.

Sincerely,

A Disappointed But Hopeful Artist at EARS" (EARS is the name given to EA’s headquarters which is based at Redwood Shores in California)

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Comments on this story

Rob Melbourne Posted at 2:20 PM March 11, 2013

Now if only people would complain about Steams always on DRM. Double standards galore in gaming, EA does one thing its the end of the world, Steam does the same thing and the sun shines..

tastybaklava Posted at 2:10 PM March 11, 2013

Amen. They did this with Diablo 3 and it caused absolute outrage.
These companies need to understand two things:
- You can't charge 'boxed product' pricing when the game is being distributed (in a large part) in digital format.
- People will be prepared to pay for what they perceive to be a quality game, so why bother with a DRM measure as harsh as this one?

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